Since I first got my hands on a computer I've known that I wanted to make my
living with them. I've progressed through sales (ugh), technical support
(not bad at the time but still not my favorite), building software (not my
cut of tea), programming (yay!) and several other sub-branches of computer
technology, until finally I've settled into developer operations
– devops for short. That means that not only do I create,
provision, maintain and secure systems, both physical and virtual, I write
programs and script to automate the process.

Currently I am a devops engineer for AT&T Mobility, meaning that if you
develop applications for their smartphones, you touch something I've had a
hand in putting together.

I started with Basic many years ago and learned how to write Perl scripts
soon after I first started contracting at Microsoft in 1996. About three
years ago I first heard of Ruby and its offspring, the web development
framework Ruby on Rails. Soon after I switched over to writing Ruby scripts
full time and these days it's my language of choice. I'm currently
maintaining three Rails-based websites, including this one and an internal
website at work that keeps track of our fleet of servers.

I also occasionally work on open source projects, including
“hamutils”, a Ruby gem that provides some useful functions for
people writing Ruby scripts for radio hams.